Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

England gave me a language and literature, the basis of what I am as a writer, but when I started writing more directly about my own experience, it wasn't England so much as what went before.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

I exist in this hyphen. I'm an Indian-American-Muslim kid, but am I more Indian, or am I more American? What part of my identity am I?

Understanding history means knowing what motivates you.

I think all of the secrets of the universe are revealed in history. We understand who we are by understanding where we've been and why we are the way we are, and where we come from.

I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older, as well as from the beginning, although I didn't know anything about it.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

My mama is African American and from Wisconsin. My baba was born in Iran. My parents have stressed the idea of creating your own path, and creating your own identity is part of that. That's why embracing these two cultures is important to me.

Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'

National identity is something that's directly connected to our personal experiences and the decisions we make, the roads we decide to take at certain points in our life.

By the time I went to college, I had totally embraced my Indianness, but I still didn't tell anyone I could sing.

My faith - as well as my Nigerian culture - really gave me the substance and foundation to be who I desire to be in life.

I've grown up a lot in England.

Scotland was home to me from when I was 12 up until I was 22. I decided to drop my English bit, and when anyone asked where I came from, I always said Scotland. It really shaped the fibres of my being.

In my 40s, the two cultures finally came to peace with one other inside me, and I have come to identify myself as both 100% Chinese and 100% American simultaneously.

The thing I found in correlation with my studies as a history major was that experience taught me you have to figure out your background, where you come from, who you are, and what you want. All of that propelled me into following acting because I had to develop characters as well as develop characters' history which is most important.

When I came to Australia in 1987 as an adoptee from India, I could not have had any idea where my life journey would take me.

I had the French culture at school and I love this culture but I also had another culture at home - that of Senegal. I think this way of growing up has made me the person I am today - because I had the two cultures.

Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages? ... I guess it's because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears - Chaucer's, Boccaccio's, Henry Knighton's, Thomas Walsingham's. Froissart's, Jean Creton's... writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today. We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves.

What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself

If you don't know where you come from, it's difficult to determine where you are.- It's even more difficult to plan where you are going.

Identity has several parts, and the self needs to expand. Black youth should be encouraged to have as many parts or as rich an identity as possible. It's a form of allowing them to be curious about the world.

It is through history that we learn who we are and how we got that way, why and how we changed, why the good sometimes prevailed and sometimes did not.